Are Non-Competes Enforceable for Therapists and Behavioral Health Staff in Oklahoma?

No. An Oklahoma practice cannot stop a departing therapist, counselor, social worker, psychologist or BCBA from working for a competitor or opening a practice across town: under 15 O.S. § 219A(B), any provision in an employer-employee contract that conflicts with § 219A is void and unenforceable.

Two restrictions survive.

You can bar direct solicitation of your established clients, and you can bar a former employee or contractor from soliciting your staff to leave.

The statute also allows a covenant in one situation outside employment: the sale of a practice.

Where Oklahoma sits among the ban states and the states that apply a reasonableness test is covered in our guide to non-competes nationally.

Oklahoma's rule is statutory, so it is unusually easy to state.

Oklahoma's restraint-of-trade statutes sit in Title 15, and 15 O.S. § 217 opens them by making every contract that restrains anyone from exercising a lawful profession, trade or business void to that extent — except as the statutes' own exceptions allow one: sale of goodwill (§ 218), dissolution of partnerships (§ 219), and the employee section (§ 219A).

The employee section is the one that governs your staff: effective June 4, 2001, 15 O.S. § 219A has provided that a person who makes an agreement with an employer, whether in writing or verbally, not to compete after the employment relationship ends is still permitted to engage in the same business as the former employer or a similar business, so long as they do not directly solicit sales from the former employer's established customers.

Subsection (B) then closes the loop: any provision in a contract between an employer and an employee that conflicts with the section is void and unenforceable.

Oklahoma's covenant law has none.

The restraint-of-trade statutes, 15 O.S. §§ 217–219B, contain no separate rule for counselors, social workers, psychologists, behavior analysts, nurses or physicians — § 219A applies to any person who agreed with an employer not to compete.

Your LPC, your LCSW, your psychologist, your BCBA, your nurses and your physicians all stand on the same statutory footing, which means the covenant analysis under these statutes does not change from profession to profession.

Do not carry that conclusion past these statutes.

If your agreement raises a question Oklahoma's restraint-of-trade statutes do not answer — whether anything in Oklahoma's professional-licensing titles (Title 59) touches covenants for a particular license, for instance — put it to Oklahoma employment counsel rather than assuming the general rule reaches it.

For employees in Oklahoma, the statute removes the time, area and legitimate-business-interest dials rather than setting them. § 219A permits exactly one restriction against a former employee — a ban on directly soliciting established customers — so there is no legitimate-business-interest balancing to run for an employee covenant. § 219A(B) voids any provision that conflicts with the section, and the section sets no time limit and no mileage limit, so a time-and-radius clause is not a starting position to negotiate down from — it is a void term as written.

Area still matters in Oklahoma where the statute allows a covenant at all.

When someone sells the goodwill of a business — an owner selling a therapy practice, for instance — 15 O.S. § 218 lets the seller agree with the buyer to refrain from carrying on a similar business within a specified county and any counties contiguous to it, or within a specified city or town, while the buyer carries on the business.

The geography comes from the sale agreement, inside that frame.

Partners have their own exception (§ 219) on a dissolution.

Neither the sale exception nor the dissolution exception reaches an ordinary employment relationship with a therapist or BCBA.

This is where an Oklahoma practice's real protection lives, and the two halves work differently.

Clients. § 219A(A) lets you prohibit the departing clinician from directly soliciting sales from your established customers — in a therapy practice, your established clients.

Note the statute's wording: it only permits restricting direct solicitation.

This research found no Oklahoma case resolving how the wording applies to a client who contacts your former clinician without any solicitation, so do not draft past it without Oklahoma employment counsel.

Staff.

Since November 1, 2013, 15 O.S. § 219B has provided that a clause barring an employee or an independent contractor from soliciting the business's employees or contractors to leave is not a restraint from exercising a lawful profession, trade or business.

A non-recruitment clause covering your technicians, your billers and your fellow clinicians is on solid ground — and it can bind an independent contractor too, not just an employee.

The client half also has to sit alongside duties your clinicians already owe under their ethics codes — standards for the clinician's own conduct, not Oklahoma law, and none of them makes a non-solicit legally void.

The NASW Code of Ethics says social workers leaving an employment setting should inform clients of appropriate options for continuing services, and the NASW and ACA codes call for avoiding client abandonment and helping arrange continuation of services.

The APA Ethics Code has psychologists make reasonable efforts to provide for orderly resolution of responsibility for client care when the employment relationship ends, and the BACB Ethics Code requires behavior analysts to spell out client-transition circumstances in their service agreements and provide a written transition plan.

Those ethics expectations, and how to write a non-solicit that respects them, are covered in our guide to non-solicitation clauses.

Start by taking the void clauses out.

A time-and-radius non-compete in an Oklahoma employment agreement does not protect you — it is void and unenforceable under § 219A(B), and leaving one in an offer letter is a poor first message to a new hire.

Replace it with the two restrictions Oklahoma actually allows: a client non-solicit drafted to § 219A's wording, and a staff non-solicit under § 219B.

Protect the client relationship operationally as well as contractually.

Keep schedule and client-contact information inside your own systems, and address confidentiality of that business information in the agreement itself.

Use the one covenant that survives an ownership change.

If you sell the practice, § 218 lets you bind yourself — the seller — within a specified county and contiguous counties or a specified city or town while the buyer carries on the business.

That belongs in the sale documents, drafted with counsel.

If the worry behind the non-compete is paying to train a clinician who then leaves, a training repayment agreement is a different instrument — see our guide to training repayment agreements before adding one to an offer.

And because a departing clinician you cannot restrain is a retention problem, not just a contract problem, put the effort into the terms that keep people: supervision quality, manageable caseloads and pay.